Chloé calls the
morning a “tender spot,” which feels right, given that much of her morning
involves slowly waking up her body for the day, leaning into the parts that
feel compressed from sleep. A performance artist, recently certified death
doula, contact improv participant and energy healer, Chloé is also working on
building her own somatic practice. We first met at Bruce High Quality
Foundation University, and have now become confidantes in matters of the body
and heart; a few days before our morning date, Chloé sent me a link to an
hour-long lecture on different forms of orgasms. When we meet on a Monday
morning in her Harlem studio apartment, Chloé and I spend our first few minutes
sampling a new sheepskin she’s bought to cover a 4” piece of memory foam that serves
as her floor-bound bed, and when I leave, I carry her copy of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

Chloé: I tend to wake up at more or less the exact time that I need to wake up. I don’t use alarms or anything. If I know I’m going to get less than eight hours’ sleep, I’ll set an alarm, but usually, my body just knows. There’s something synchronistic, even uncanny about it. Because you’re not in your body at night, right, you’re asleep. You’re elsewhere, or maybe nowhere. Hopefully you’re not wandering too far, but you’re somewhere, and then you come back; you re-enter yourself, or re-emerge into yourself. Then all of your systems have to wake up.

I feel like I’m not quite in my body after I wake up, so every morning I’ll slowly start to move my extremities, and then I’ll start to roll around. My spine has been an area of concentration for me at the moment; my hips too. After I roll around, then maybe I’ll do some shaking. I learned this technique that allows your body to naturally shake. When an animal hurts itself it’ll start shaking, and when you’re cold you shake, and when you’re stressed you shake to relieve tension. This is a technique that our body already knows; a mechanism to release tension from our bodies. So I’ll shake a bit and move my spine, and emerge into the day that way. I’ll also make a sound or tone, either while I’m rolling around and shaking or after—whatever feels right. Then I get up.

In the past, I think I’ve done pretty much everything undesirable in terms of how I want to start my mornings. Even now, sometimes I’ll be tempted to grab my phone and look at Facebook before I’m fully in my body, and that often doesn’t end well, because then I start the day in obsessive mind instead of body-mind. If I look at computer things as soon as I wake up, especially after looking at computer things before bed, then I’m just in computer-mind all day, which is a very narrow and obsessive-feeling mind to me. Obsessive-mind, at least to me, feels analogous to the side effects of a peak orgasm. When you orgasm from the clitoris, or when one ejaculates from the penis, you’re orgasming from the pudendal nerve, which means that you’re contracting your whole body to this one tiny point—a point that tenses up, contracts, and spasms. After a pudendal orgasm your dopamine crashes and your prolactin spikes. It’s a five-second-long orgasm that can cause a seventeen-day long chemical imbalance in the body, which then causes the body to obsessively seek out more peak orgasms to correct the imbalance. When you’re looking at Facebook, you’re zooming in on these tiny, often obsession-oriented, points of consciousness; you’re contracting your attention. Then you spasm out a post, get off Facebook, crash, and need to get back on Facebook again. So maybe the addiction to Facebook is a similar addiction to a peak orgasm. Probably most addictions function similarly. Orgasms from other nerves in the body, on the other hand, along with rolling around, shaking, and toning, create expansiveness in the body. What I want to do in the morning is expand; anything that contracts me I want to avoid.

Right now I’m also thinking about a passage from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, that talks about the sun figuratively setting on some people and rising on others, over and over again. For some people, the sun is always setting on them. They’re like, “I’m running out of time, I’m too fat, I’m too old, I’m too ugly, I’m too sick. I’m just gonna drink! Gimme that cigarette—I’m gonna die anyway.” And then there are people who are like, “Everything’s going to be fine. Time doesn’t really exist. I’m healthy. I’m just going to take it day by day, things are getting better all the time. I’m coming into my abundance.” I would wager that the second group of people have a better relationship with their mornings.

Chloé calls the
morning a “tender spot,” which feels right, given that much of her morning
involves slowly waking up her body for the day, leaning into the parts that
feel compressed from sleep. A performance artist, recently certified death
doula, contact improv participant and energy healer, Chloé is also working on
building her own somatic practice. We first met at Bruce High Quality
Foundation University, and have now become confidantes in matters of the body
and heart; a few days before our morning date, Chloé sent me a link to an
hour-long lecture on different forms of orgasms. When we meet on a Monday
morning in her Harlem studio apartment, Chloé and I spend our first few minutes
sampling a new sheepskin she’s bought to cover a 4” piece of memory foam that serves
as her floor-bound bed, and when I leave, I carry her copy of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

Chloé: I tend to wake up at more or less the exact time that I need to wake up. I don’t use alarms or anything. If I know I’m going to get less than eight hours’ sleep, I’ll set an alarm, but usually, my body just knows. There’s something synchronistic, even uncanny about it. Because you’re not in your body at night, right, you’re asleep. You’re elsewhere, or maybe nowhere. Hopefully you’re not wandering too far, but you’re somewhere, and then you come back; you re-enter yourself, or re-emerge into yourself. Then all of your systems have to wake up.

I feel like I’m not quite in my body after I wake up, so every morning I’ll slowly start to move my extremities, and then I’ll start to roll around. My spine has been an area of concentration for me at the moment; my hips too. After I roll around, then maybe I’ll do some shaking. I learned this technique that allows your body to naturally shake. When an animal hurts itself it’ll start shaking, and when you’re cold you shake, and when you’re stressed you shake to relieve tension. This is a technique that our body already knows; a mechanism to release tension from our bodies. So I’ll shake a bit and move my spine, and emerge into the day that way. I’ll also make a sound or tone, either while I’m rolling around and shaking or after—whatever feels right. Then I get up.

In the past, I think I’ve done pretty much everything undesirable in terms of how I want to start my mornings. Even now, sometimes I’ll be tempted to grab my phone and look at Facebook before I’m fully in my body, and that often doesn’t end well, because then I start the day in obsessive mind instead of body-mind. If I look at computer things as soon as I wake up, especially after looking at computer things before bed, then I’m just in computer-mind all day, which is a very narrow and obsessive-feeling mind to me. Obsessive-mind, at least to me, feels analogous to the side effects of a peak orgasm. When you orgasm from the clitoris, or when one ejaculates from the penis, you’re orgasming from the pudendal nerve, which means that you’re contracting your whole body to this one tiny point—a point that tenses up, contracts, and spasms. After a pudendal orgasm your dopamine crashes and your prolactin spikes. It’s a five-second-long orgasm that can cause a seventeen-day long chemical imbalance in the body, which then causes the body to obsessively seek out more peak orgasms to correct the imbalance. When you’re looking at Facebook, you’re zooming in on these tiny, often obsession-oriented, points of consciousness; you’re contracting your attention. Then you spasm out a post, get off Facebook, crash, and need to get back on Facebook again. So maybe the addiction to Facebook is a similar addiction to a peak orgasm. Probably most addictions function similarly. Orgasms from other nerves in the body, on the other hand, along with rolling around, shaking, and toning, create expansiveness in the body. What I want to do in the morning is expand; anything that contracts me I want to avoid.

Right now I’m also thinking about a passage from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, that talks about the sun figuratively setting on some people and rising on others, over and over again. For some people, the sun is always setting on them. They’re like, “I’m running out of time, I’m too fat, I’m too old, I’m too ugly, I’m too sick. I’m just gonna drink! Gimme that cigarette—I’m gonna die anyway.” And then there are people who are like, “Everything’s going to be fine. Time doesn’t really exist. I’m healthy. I’m just going to take it day by day, things are getting better all the time. I’m coming into my abundance.” I would wager that the second group of people have a better relationship with their mornings.